


Nobodies Nobody Knows

by cooperjones2020



Series: Who Sings Heartache to Sleep [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Jughead Jones on a motorcycle, Slow Burn, and pining, hopefully lots of feels, post break-up bughead
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-08
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-11-29 06:20:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11434950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cooperjones2020/pseuds/cooperjones2020
Summary: She is the lamp in Hero’s tower, the scissors in Delilah’s hand, the blood in Guinevere’s bed. She is a million and one metaphors and all of them are his undoing.----Some of the scenes from Second City but from Jughead's perspective. More a character exercise than a story. Canon compliant through the end of season 1.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I really don't know if this can stand on its own without Second City. Probably not, as it will only be some of the scenes and only when I feel like it.  
> (also title is from Nelson Algren's epic prose poem Chicago: City on the Make, specifically the sixth section, No More Giants)

“Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”  
-Nelson Algren

  


By the time Sunday night rolls around, Jughead Jones wants a beer, a shower, and several hours uninterrupted with his Netflix. He has been doing line edits on his new manuscript for ten hours, sitting hunched over his coffee table. Because he’s a grown-ass man and he doesn’t own a desk.

So, more than the beer, the shower, and the Netflix, he wants to grunt and sweat and expend some goddamn energy until his muscles are as tired as his eyes.

But, instead of any of those things — those blessedly simple, easy to satisfy desires — because the universe has a fucking sadistic sense of humor — he walks into Mary Andrews’s house to find Betty Cooper.

Now that he thinks about it, Mary had looked surprised when she’d opened the door. But he’d pushed his way in and made himself at home the way he’d been doing since he was 19. Mike was expecting him. They had a date with some wood.

It’s not a creepy sex thing. He’s taken up woodworking and furniture restoration.

Except Mike is in London. Halfway down the hallway, her words stop him cold. “Here, come into the living room, I’m having dinner with Betty.”

“Betty.” He only knows one Betty. “Betty Cooper?” Red alert. SOS. All hands on deck.

“Of course Betty Cooper. Didn’t I tell you she was moving here?”

“No actually, I don’t think you did.” He doesn’t know how much Mary knows, doesn’t know if it’s truly an oversight on her part or if Archie has told her something and she thinks she’s helping him by keeping him in the dark about Betty. If it’s the latter, she is. Or she was, anyway.

But she’s already pushed past him into the living room. There’s nothing else for it.

 

Betty Cooper is every bit as beautiful as she was ten years ago. More so. And he swears his heart stops in his chest when he rounds the corner and sees her for the first time.

He truly hasn’t seen her since high school. He doesn’t have a facebook, doesn’t follow her on instagram. She may have featured in a few of Archie’s posts over the years, but he’s always told his eyes to slide off of her. To not linger on what he can never have. She looks older. No shit. But more mature, more relaxed. Her neck looks longer and her hair shorter. It is still a beam of sunlight.

Jughead Jones is a writer. And he likes to think he’s at least okay at it. He trades in metaphor and simile, synechdoche and metonym. But his entire life, every time he’s seen her, the only thing that’s shot through him, the only word he’s been able to grab onto and hold is sunlight. The color, the warmth, the feeling.

 

When she says hello and reaches out a hand, he takes it automatically. Something somewhere in his nervous system is misfiring. He’s pretty sure he says her name.

“Can I get you some food, Jug?”

Ah yes, a distraction. “Always Mary. Do you even have to ask?”

Of course that means Mary turns back to the kitchen, so Jughead is left sitting across from Betty Cooper, staring at her like she’s a goddamn ghost. Betty, forever her mother’s daughter, manages to make small talk.

“Did you say something about a desk?”

“A—? Oh yeah. Mike and I are restoring this turn-of-the-century roll-top desk Mary found at an estate sale. It was gift when _The Final Fissure_ hit the bestseller list.” Idiot. Stop bragging.

But then he notices color creeping her up chest and her eyes slide to the right. Where what he assumes is her purse sits in front of the fireplace with a very familiar cover peaking out of the top. Before he gives himself a chance to think, he picks it up.

“If you ask me if I want an autograph, I’ll clock you.”

“I would never.”

It’s a paperback, and it feels like a pretty new one. The pages are crisp and there’s no crack in the spine. He thumbs through it.

“Why, Betty Cooper, no annotations? I’m shocked.” That’s good, Jug. That’s almost funny.

“Actually—that might be my second copy. I got to the airport way too early and, in a whirlwind of productivity, I’d already shipped all my books here—well not here, cause they’re in Lexington at the moment—but I didn’t have anything to read and I’d already finished the newspaper and it was on display in Hudson’s. I picked it up just to look at but before I knew it you’d sucked me back in. So I bought it so I’d have something to do on the plane.”

There are many threads in that spiel on which he’d like to tug— _Lexington?_ —but at the knowledge that she not only found his writing compelling but found it compelling enough to buy _two_ copies of his book, his heart swells up in his chest and he can’t breathe.

“Hey you don’t have to justify buying my book to me.”

He’d actually thought about sending her a copy, before it first came out. He debates telling her that, just to see how she’d react.

But then Mary returns.

“Here you go, Jug. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Logically, he doesn’t. So he accepts his plate and turns tail for the basement, trying to ignore the ball of string that wants to lead him out of the labyrinth, up the stairs, right to where Betty sits.

So many questions run through Jughead Jones’s mind the first time he sets eyes on Betty Cooper in ten years. But above all he wants to ask her, _Who are you now, Betts? How did you get here from there, Betts? What happened to you when I left you? Did you find the strength I always knew you had?_

 

For a while, he loses himself in the slog of paint stripper, sand paper, and power tools. He tries not to think about the fact that they’re almost certainly talking about him. He wants to know what she’s asking Mary. He wants to know what Mary’s telling her. He’s ashamed when he considers creeping up the stairs to listen at the doorway.

 

When he emerges a few hours later, most of the lights on the first floor have been extinguished. But for the glow creeping its way down the hallway from the kitchen, slipping its fingers into Betty’s hair where she sleeps on the living room couch, an afghan slipping off one shoulder.

He gives himself a moment just to look at her. When the moment passes, he turns and Mary is watching him from the doorway, a mug of tea cupped in her hands.

“How’d it go?” There’s a look in her eyes he can’t quite decipher, but he’d bet his next advance it’s not about his pet project.

“Slow progress. I’m trying not to damage the wood when I remove the old varnish. It’s like the Battle of Verdun but for my patience. When’d you lose Sleeping Beauty over here?

“An hour and half or so ago. I was going to just let her sleep on the couch but I’d forgotten you were here. Maybe you could carry her upstairs.” Everything inside him screams out yes: yes, take her in your arms again; yes, press your cheek to her hair; yes, match the rhythm of her heartbeat to yours. But everything also screams out no: no, don’t torture yourself; no, she wouldn’t want it; no, you have no right. The two everythings wrench him apart.

But then, before he can respond: “I’m awake!” And so she is.

“Hey Pippi Longstocking.” He wonders how many more mediocre movie references he can jam into tonight.

“Betty, you’re welcome to sleep in the guest room upstairs. But if you want to go home, I’m sure Jughead can take you.” His stomach twists in two different directions again.

“Oh no that’s alright, Mary. I can just take the L.” Like hell she can.

“No, Betty, you’re not riding the red line home by yourself this late at night.” He is not being a caveman. He would say that to anyone. Hell, _he_ wouldn’t ride the red line at midnight by himself. Especially not if there’s been a game tonight — which he thinks there has been. And he looks scary. He has a leather jacket!

“Jug’s right, honey. It’s not safe and you’re so new to the city anyway. Let him take you home.”

He’s not quite sure how, because he can tell she doesn’t want to, but Mary somehow convinces her. He tries to mentally prepare himself to have her on the back of his bike, touching him, a twisted version of his sixteen-year-old self’s fantasy come to life.

When Mary has kissed his helmet and vanished back into the house, he asks, “So where to, Miss Daisy?” Update: the answer is one. One more mediocre movie reference.

She names an address near the Newberry. “Of course you live in River North.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ask me again in a month if you haven’t figured it out.” Stupid. Betty in Chicago is not equal to Betty in his life. He will not try to parse whether this is a fantasy or a nightmare. He will not let himself hope. Hope is not for people like him.

“And where do you live?”

“In Logan Square. And before you say anything, I lived there before the hipsters moved in.” More stupid. She’ll definitely latch onto that.

She does. “Really? Before the hipsters moved in? Well okay then. By all means, continue to proselytize on the ills of gentrification.”

He snaps his visor shut and swings a leg over the bike.

 

He takes her down Lake Shore Drive though it’s slightly out of the way, so they can enjoy the juxtaposition of the city lights and the deep, dark lake. In the night air, her arms burn where they touch his chest.

When they get to her building, she awkwardly climbs off and he stows the helmet in a saddlebag.

Then she touches him. “Thanks, Juggie.”

He sucks in a breath. He feels the point of contact, the nickname, zing through his system. She, too, seems to realize what she’s done.

He can’t help himself. He slides a hand down her arm, cupping her elbow, before bringing it to rest atop hers. He lifts it and squeezes, says, “Night Betts.”

“Night.” He watches her slip into her building, then kicks the bike to life and roars away. He takes the corner as sharply as he can get away with and heads toward the expressway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it too soon to make jokes about WWI?


	2. Chapter 2

When he gets the email, his first thought is that it’s spam. He is sitting against a pillar in the United terminal, one leg drawn in, dicking around on his phone to pass the time, when he gets the notification.

“Hi Jughead,

This is Betty Cooper. I don’t know if Mary’s mentioned this, but I’m writing for _The Chicago Tribune_ now, specifically writing features on the arts scene in the city. My editor and I were discussing you, and I was wondering if you’d be interested in setting up an interview, in advance of the publication of _The Final Fissure_ ’s sequel. I’ve attached copies of a few previous interviews I’ve done with other authors, so you can see if my style is something you’d be comfortable with. I can put together a more coherent pitch if you need more details.

Thanks,

Betty Cooper

P.S.—I got your email from Mary, just in case you were worried it was floating around on the internet.”

But it can’t be spam because only Betty would attach writing samples and only Betty would feel the need to clarify that she didn’t internet stalk him. Too bad he does internet stalk her and he’s already read those pieces. Her interviews are works of art. They should be in the Paris Review. They’re moving, funny, deeply insightful. They’re exactly how he wants someone to talk about his writing. Revealing in a way that leaves the interviewee vulnerable, unmasking them in a way their own writing does not. They’re exactly what he’s afraid Betty will see if she turns her full attention on him.

His thumbs rush over the keyboard, then hover over the send button. But the plane has begun to board and if he doesn’t respond now, he’ll spend the whole flight thinking about it. He needs to sleep. Sleep is hard to come by whenever Jellybean and her record collection are in his vicinity.

He hits send and immediately puts his phone on airplane mode. It does not seem like something that would be Betty’s idea. He doesn’t think she’d voluntarily want to spend more time with him than is necessary. But she asks, and he’s powerless like a moth to a flame. Or, like a mosquito to a goddamn bug zapper.

He does not sleep on the flight.

 

His first-day-back-in-Riverdale ritual consists of a long walk followed by the reward of a Pop’s cheeseburger, fries, and milkshake. He visits the river, the site of the former Twilight—sadly now turned into a horrendous strip mall—Sunnyside, both high schools. He doesn’t think about Betty. And if he fills a few pages of the notebook in his pocket, so what? It’s the nostalgia that inspires him.

He ends up at Pop’s and texts Archie a photo from his lunch with Fred. It’s not a selfie. JB takes it during her shift break, which she spends sitting on the edge of his booth, eating his fries.

 

When they were kids and he got sent to juvie for the summer for trying to burn down the school, he wasn’t that upset. If anything, it’s a moment in his life he counts as a win because it is the moment he knew unequivocally that Archie and Betty really loved him, that they were really on his team for keeps. They’d each been so angry. Archie had kicked over a table, and Betty had screamed at the guard who caught them, at the principal, at her parents.

He hadn’t been trying to burn down the school. They wanted to camp out at the playground and he was trying to light the bonfire so they could roast hot dogs and s’mores. Betty trembled with fury, accidentally dislodging some sticks and leaves that had gotten stuck in her ponytail. Alight with justice even then, she had been outraged that he got into trouble while she and Archie didn’t. They were all equally guilty. They all had set up the tent, gathered the sticks. Jughead may have been holding the match, but she was holding the box.

But that didn’t matter. His family had moved into the trailer park the spring before, just barely remaining on the Riverdale side of the school district line. His father had been coming home drunk more and more, wearing a black leather jacket with a green snake on the back more and more.

So when Archie and Betty got so mad on his behalf, he wanted to say, “It’s okay, I knew this was coming. I knew this was who I was.” He wanted to say, “Thank you for loving me even though I don’t belong with you.”

His first-day-back-in-Riverdale ritual mostly consists of a long walk rewarded by a Pop’s cheeseburger, fries, and milkshake. But, since he bought the house two years ago, it’s also consisted of waking up far earlier than his body is accustomed to, when he’s sure FP and Jellybean won’t be up yet, and sitting at his kitchen island in a chair he’d built drinking coffee he’d bought. He gets a perverse and vindicating sort of pleasure every time he’s in this house. It reminds him, more than the college degree and the book and the bank account with a comfortable amount of zeros that he’s not that kid in the trailer park anymore. And if he lost a lot on the way to get here, he can live with that. Nothing worth having comes easy.

 

The Skype call goes just about how he imagines it would. He considers it a success that he only really embarrassed himself the one time. After confiscating and hiding all the lighter fluid, he returns to his perch at the edge of the patio and resumes staring at the iPad’s darkened screen.

“It’s not a surprise, Jughead,” she’d said, so softly. “I have read the book.”

“I know—I know. And I didn’t try very hard to mask the details. But you haven’t read the second one yet.”

“Well, I will soon.” He knows she’s trying to lighten the mood, but she inadvertently touches on exactly what he’s afraid of. What’s he’s dreading. What he wants.

Then he’d taken her outside, in desperate need of a smoke to soothe the nerves she’d frayed. The inquisitive look on her face had been both heartwarming and heart wrenching. As had the realization that he could still read her like a book.

“It’s—uh—a little house off Pine. For Dad and JB. The down payment seemed like a good use of my first advance.” He needs to end this call asap.

“Look — I’ll be back on Monday night but I have some things to take care of. Would Wednesday be okay for you? Say around 8?”

“Yeah, that’ll be great.”

“Thanks. I’ll think of a good place and get in touch.” Then he’d looked up and seen the troupe of teenage girls heading toward the fire pit, sticks and lighter in hand. “Jesus Christ. Her friends have arrived. They’re heading for the fire pit.

“I’ll talk to you soon Betty.”

 

At some point after JB’s friends descended upon his house but before the party turns so raucous that he feels the need to hide, he walks into the kitchen and finds her alone.

“That was real subtle earlier.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Forsythe.”

“To Love Somebody?”

“I’m working my way through the discography of everyone who was at Woodstock” she says archly. Then, more gently, “So how is Betty?”

“She’s…Betty. Brilliant, blonde, beautiful. All of the positive b adjectives.”

“And how are you?”

“I’m fine, Jelly. I’m a grown up. It’s been more than ten years.”

“But you haven’t moved on.”

“Yes, I have.” At Jellybean’s look he continues, “I have. I have accepted that a part of me will always love her. But I’m not pining. I’m dating, remember? Remember that redhead you said was too hot for me?”

Jellybean rolls her eyes. “That was eight months ago.” They each prepare plates of food in silence for a few moments.

“Her mom and sister come into Pop’s sometimes, you know. With her niece and nephew.”

“That’s not surprising, everyone eats at Pop’s.”

“Polly said she’s single.”

“I don’t want to know why you and Polly were talking about that.”

“I’m serious, Jug. Look, what happened…happened. Maybe you should tell her. Maybe this is the universe giving you an opportunity to make it right.”

“It doesn’t matter. She’s moved on. Telling her would only hurt her all over again. We’re just going to work together, and then I’ll go back to being on the periphery of her life. An old high school boyfriend she runs into occasionally. Now, come here.”

He wraps her up in a hug and rests his chin on the top of her head. “I love you for worrying about me, but I promise I’m okay. Go back outside and drink whatever shitty beer your friends managed to sneak in.”

“We don’t have shitty beer, we have vodka.”

“Christ. Okay, don’t let Dad see it.”

“He won’t. It wouldn’t matter though. He’s doing so good, Jug.”

“It will always matter. And I know he is, I just want to make sure he keeps doing good.”

“He will.” Then Jellybean heads back outside, balancing a paper plate of food in each hand. “And so will you.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter just did not want to come. But I’ve been sitting on it and now it needs to make its way in the world if only so I can move on. The second part of this scene will be posted tomorrow night and Second City should be updated Sunday.
> 
> Also, this chapter goes with Second City chp. 3 and I’m pretty sure requires it to make sense.

He sees her open the door to the bar out of the corner of his eye, sees her spot him and head over. But he continues to type until she sets her bag down on the chair next to him. He hasn’t had a break through or anything. In truth, he’s typing his grocery list over and over. But it gives him a moment to adjust to her presence—the light floral scent of her perfume, the shift in the air around them that he can almost feel press against him—before he has to turn to look at her.

He saves his file and closes the computer while calling her out on trying to apologize for being on time. He’s not surprised she does. And he had gotten here an hour early on purpose. But still.

 

The small talk is going well, he thinks, until the bartender sets the drink in front of her, and in a flash she goes from peach to pale to puce to pink. But she does not appreciate his attempts to interfere.

When Betty gets up and walks away, Jughead convinces the bartender to take back the offending drink, though not before he swipes the cherries. Once the bathroom door shuts behind her, he bites down with his molars and slides them off the toothpick in one move, while glaring at the man.

He knows he’s being childish. He’s not jealous, per se. He knows he can’t have her, knows she doesn’t really want to be here with him. But he is surprised at the protectiveness that flares in his chest when he sees her looking so uncomfortable.

Also. It’s the principle of the matter. It’s rude. The man could clearly see they were together. Not _together_ together, but you know what he means. The drink was clearly a power move meant to make them uncomfortable, to establish the other man’s alpha maleness.

It’s the kind of crap Jughead has very little patience for. He stands by his assessment: “What a dick.”

 

So all in all, the evening gets off to a rocky start. Though tequila definitely helps. Not the liquor itself, but the look in Betty’s eyes right before she takes the shot.

He’s not sure why he orders the round of shots in the first place. Tequila is definitely not his drink of choice, though he wouldn’t surprised if Betty sometimes drank it on nights out with her girlfriends. He supposes part of him just wants to see what she’ll do.

So when she asks him about it, he simply says, “Liquid courage, Betts.”

Then she gives him a patented Betty Cooper look. The one that says she’s incredulous that he would think she needed any more courage that she already possessed. The one that says she’ll rise to any challenge.

“You’re a bad influence, Jones.”

“Always.”

 

After the bartender has switched out their empty shot glasses for a more sedate bottle of beer and glass of wine, he prompts her, “So we should probably get started?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” He watches her fiddle with the recorder, angling it so the microphone will capture them both.

She begins, “The sequel came as a bit of a surprise. At the end of _The Final Fissure_ , you revealed the murderer. What story is left to tell?”

It is the question he’s gotten most often since the sequel was announced, so he has an answer already rehearsed. But then she catches him off guard.

“I was surprised when I first picked up _Final Fissure_ and saw the genre. You gave up on your Philip Marlowe fantasies.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know how much hard boiled crime fiction you’ve read, but it usually doesn’t turn out well for the women. You get to college and take one theory course, and all of a sudden all you can see is the male gaze and the forced dichotomy between the ingenue and the femme fatale.”

He is an utter ass. Worse than that, he’s a pretentious utter ass. And he knows it. Truthfully, he sort of always is, though he hopes not this much. But it’s what people expect out of 20-something white male writers. And it makes sitting next to her, talking like this, easier. It gives him a character to inhabit that isn’t Jughead Jones, still pitifully in love with memories of his high school girlfriend.

“Besides, you took over the story pretty early on and your voice—sorry, Betsy’s voice—was pretty insistent.”

She makes a face. “You just had to pick Betsy, didn’t you? Do you remember our third grade teacher called me that all year, no matter how many times me, or you, or Archie corrected her?” Of course he remembers. It’s a memory he’s confronted daily once it became clear that “Betsy” she would stay.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I tried to call her every variation of Elizabeth there is. Eliza stuck for a while but I kept writing ‘Betts’ in spite of myself so calling her Betsy saved me a ton of rewriting and annoyed calls from my editor.”

He wants to say: She would only every respond to Betty. She could only ever be you. But he doesn’t. They’re having an okay time so far, and he doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable. Instead, he says, “Though she found other things to latch onto. She thought ‘Betsy’ was ‘too mid-century, not enough millennial.’”

 

Betty’s questions continue, strictly professional. Some of them he’s had before, but all of them have a unique Betty spin. He doesn’t know if it’s because she knows him that she knows just what to ask or if it’s that she’s really that good an interviewer. Probably the latter. After all, she doesn’t know him. And he doesn’t know her anymore.

“One of the big changes this time around must be your relationship to your readers. Have you felt the pressure of people waiting for this story, of what they might want to happen next? Has it affected you, either in your work or in your life?”

“Obviously the story starts in your head. But as soon as it’s printed, readers make it their own. It’s a dialogue in which they define the story—and me as the author, by default—as much as by who _they_ are as by who I am. In the case of _The Final Fissure_ , I was just trying to tell the story. Writing it was as much an act of therapy for me as it was a work of literature for everyone else. I wrote it as a teenager and then sat on it for many years, before I had the emotional distance I needed to edit it into a shape that would hold some broader appeal. This time around, it’s a little bit meta. _Sweetwater Subtext_ is the same narrator coming back to a defining event of his life, trying to understand how it’s shaped him. _Final Fissure_ was for me, but _Sweetwater Subtext_ I did write with a specific audience in mind.”

“Not the audience who’s bought and loved it?”

“No, something a bit narrower than that.”

He fully admits he’s been rambling. It’s definitely part of why he sounds like an asshole. It’s okay when he looks straight ahead, but when he looks at her, when she blushes or bites her lip or pushes her tongue against her teeth, a little more of the filter between his mouth and his brain evaporates.

So yeah. Definitely shouldn’t have said that last bit.

It’s like standing naked in front of an open window. He doesn’t know if he wants her to see. He doesn’t know _what_ he wants her to see.

So they muddle on.

 

“Did your routine change? Anything in the physical process of how you wrote?”

“Definitely. Being an established author has conveyed a huge privilege on me. _The Final Fissure_ was written in spare time at school or late nights at the diner. I’m still a nighttime writer. I still can’t write at home, I need people around me to observe. But writing gets to be the focus of my day now. I’ve also gotten better at letting other people see my writing. As a teenager, I was obsessive about making it perfect first.”

“Oh I remember.” He smirks at her, just a little, then wider when her eyes crinkle in response.

“But now, sometimes it’s just get it on the page and send it off, especially if I’m under a deadline. Still, though, I like some feedback if only to reaffirm my own conviction that I’m headed in the right direction. Actually, Archie looked at a few chapters of _Sweetwater Subtext_ pretty early on.”

“Really? I can’t see him as a particularly dedicated editor.”

Jughead can’t help but laugh. “No, definitely not. But it was more feedback on the content I was looking for, than the style. Whether I was crossing a line with anything.”

“Well, color me intrigued.”

“Good.” Yes. Concision. Good, Jug.

“I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.”

“Right, obviously. That was stupid of me.”

He wants to correct her, to tell her he can’t bear to hear Archie talk about her, to hear him be so casual about the intimacy they share post-break up, an intimacy his own decisions have denied him. But that seems like a minefield he shouldn’t wander into two drinks deep.

“On a related note, what do you owe to the real people upon whom you base your characters?”

“That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with, insufficient as it is, is honesty.” And he means it, even if he hasn’t been successful at it himself.


	4. Chapter 4

(Previously on Nobodies Nobody Knows:

“I’m surprised Archie didn’t tell you I was moving here.”

“Yeah, well, we don’t exactly talk about you.”

“Right, obviously. That was stupid of me.”

He wants to correct her, to tell her he can’t bear to hear Archie talk about her, to hear him be so casual about the intimacy they share post-break up, an intimacy his own decisions have denied him. But that seems like a minefield he shouldn’t wander into two drinks deep.

“On a related note, what do you owe to the real people upon whom you base your characters?”

“That’s a question I’ve been wrestling with. The best answer I’ve been able to come up with, insufficient as it is, is honesty.” And he means it, even if he hasn’t been successful at it himself.)

  


“Okay, let’s get back to _Sweetwater Subtext_ for a second. As we’ve said, _The Final Fissure_ had an obvious ending point with the reveal of the murderer. I know you can’t give me any spoilers, but what’s next for these characters? Will there be a third entry in this series?”

“Unclear.” She looks at him then, confused, he thinks. Fair enough, so is he. He has no idea what he’s projecting, what signals she is receiving that he may or may not intend.

“Oh. Um, okay. Any idea what does come next then?”

“Well, _The Final Fissure_ is gonna be a TV show. We’re still working out if I’m going to be involved, though right now I’m leaning no.”

She moves to put up her hair and—he can’t be sure, but—he thinks he sees the lightest of tan lines on her left ring finger. His stomach bottoms out. It insists this is the Worst. Thing. Then his liver quips back, no it’s the Best. Thing. At that point his brain comes back online and shuts the conversation between his bodily organs down by reminding them that it’s actually a completely irrelevant thing cause this is a job anyway, not Betty back in his life. Also, it’s probably just the dim light in the bar. His stomach growls.

“Would you mind if we took a break? I could use some food.”

“Oh of course, I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize, I was just on a roll earlier and skipped dinner.”

“Jughead Jones voluntarily skipped a meal?”

“I wouldn’t call it voluntary. Sometimes the muse is actually a slave driver.”

When he has recovered, in no small part thanks to some fried pickles and mozzarella sticks, he says, “I didn’t mean it like that earlier. It’s just, I don’t know, I think it would be kind of weird if me and Archie talked about you. That whole same-ex-girlfriend thing.”

“You know, sometimes I even forget we dated. It was such a weird, hazy time in my life. I fought so hard for so long to be my own person, not Polly’s sister or Alice’s daughter. By the time senior year came around, I was tired of fighting everyone’s expectations. Veronica was back in New York, you were on the south side. We were the only two left, of the core four, and it just made sense, you know? So we went to the back to school dance together, and then homecoming, and then winter formal. And before you know it was prom and we’d been dating for eight months.”

“I always thought you two would get married and have the 2.5 kids and white picket fence thing. You know, even when we were dating, I think I thought that in the back of my mind.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “I know. It wasn’t in the back of your mind. I seem to recall a certain speech in a certain red-headed person’s garage at a certain other person’s birthday party.”

“God, I’m never going to live that one down. Once I managed to go an entire eleven months without thinking about it, and then the memory just crept back in. _Here, Jughead, you think you’re making progress on your social skills, well remember this?_ ” He feels his sympathetic nervous system begin to stir just at the memory.

“Well that was never in the cards for me and Archie, and I didn’t want it to be. Dating him was just…comforting you know? Comfortable. And I could really use that then.”

“Do me a favor and promise me that you will never tell Archie that. You guys may be best friends and he may be ass over elbows for Veronica now, but no guy wants to know that sex with him was just comfortable.” That sounds light, teasing. Not like hypotheticals about her and Archie tortured him for years. Right?

Betty holds up a pinkie and waits for him to take it. “I promise.”

 

“I was surprised, when I walked into Mary’s and found you.”

“I had gathered that. Though you were probably no more surprised than I was.”

“What made you decide to move?” He’s wanted to ask her since that night. Has almost asked Mary a dozen times, but has chickened out each and every one.

“I was just so sick of New York, sick of my job. I was running on a cycle of adrenaline—benzodiazepines—caffeine—melatonin that was unsustainable. I got home from a stakeout one morning at 5 am and I realized I was doing important things for other people, breaking big stories, but as a result I missed out on doing important things for myself. I was making decisions I otherwise wouldn’t have made.

“Then I got a call from Cynthia—my editor—offering me the job here. It was a _deus ex machina_ , just what I needed at just the right time dropped out of the sky. It felt like a good time to pull the rug out from under myself. To look for a new dream.” God preserve him from a girl who drops literary devices into everyday conversation.

“And that’s okay, you know? I feel like the hardest part is telling other people, people who knew me then. Like I’m afraid they’re going to think I’ve compromised, but I’m happy. Dreams change. Well, at least for most of us.” She bumps her elbow into his arm.

Weirdly, now he wants to hug her. Well, he’s wanted to hug her, to touch her, since she came in, as much as he’s also been terrified to. But he wants to tell her he’s proud of her. Which is dumb. She doesn’t need his pride. She doesn’t need anyone.

“I think you probably filled your quota of breaking big stories before you even left high school. I’m glad you realized you weren’t happy and did something about it.” He pauses and takes a big breath. “And I’m glad you’re here. Glad we could do this.”

She smiles his favorite smile at him, the one where the corners of her lips curve down. “Me too.”

“Polly said Jellybean works at Pop’s now.”

“Yeah, for about a year.”

“Does that mean you get free burgers?”

“No.” He wishes. “Only half-price. But yeah, she mentioned last week that Polly and your mom come in sometimes with the twins.”

“Yeah. Her and my mom have gotten a lot closer the past couple years. Since my dad died.”

“Oh, Betts, I’m sorry.” It’s not as hard to be sincere as he would have expected.

“It’s alright. He’d been sick for a while. We…made our peace with it. With each other. But you know what’s sick? My mom’s been happier since. Like thirty fucking years and I’m pretty sure they were both miserable almost the whole time. How do you get to the point where it’s not even worth trying to go after happiness?”

“Sometimes you fall into a pattern that isn’t worth the effort it would take to break. Not everyone is as brave as you. I’m certainly not. And they had other things they were living for. Polly. You. I think that’s something I’ve learned since FP got out. My mom died, too, before— well, before. I think that’s that one thing that really fucked my dad up. That he didn’t get a chance to make it right with her. I’m sure it’s why he’s been a model citizen ever since.”

“No, Juggie. He was always so proud of you. I’m sure it’s for you. For what you’ve done for him, and for Jellybean.”

 

His anecdote about Archie and the Thanksgiving mashed potatoes makes her laugh, and this reinsertion of Archie into the conversation seems to find the balance, to negate his earlier slip-up. Archie’s antics sound like childhood and friendship and fun, and the air around them now is thinner. He breathes easier. He thinks he manages to achieve that lightness, that ease that he fought so hard for earlier in the night.

 

She’s playing with her water glass, twisting it back and forth in her hand, when he remembers. There are no red marks or indentations, but he at least expects to see the silvery threads of her half-moon scars cutting across the palm of her hand. Maybe it’s the bad lighting again? Or his eyes. Honestly, probably his eyes at this point. She catches him staring.

“I don’t do that anymore. I…haven’t since college.”

“Can I ask what made you stop?” He resists the urge to cup and kiss her hands, like he did in a booth at Pop’s, all those years ago.

“I had to de-escalate. It didn’t work at first. I just switched to picking at my skin—my nails or acne or scabs. I still have pretty bad scars on my shoulders. But when I got to college, I was able to see a therapist who my mom couldn’t interrogate so that helped. She told me to hold an ice cube when I have the urge to do something destructive.”

He wants to confess something to her in return, wants her to know how much he appreciates her sharing these pieces of herself with him, of all people. But he’s afraid he’ll open a door he won’t be able to close again. So he just urges her to go on. “An ice cube?”

“Yeah, to cup it in the palm of my hand. Anyway, I’m a work in progress.” Her eyes jump from her hand to his face. “Wait. How did this turn into you interviewing me?”

“Well technically we’re still on our dinner break.”

“Okay, whatever.” She asks him a few more questions, but his mind is still on her hands and her battle scars and the memory of them in the booth at Pop’s.

“I should probably go home soon.” He doesn’t process her words until she stands and begins to pack up her bag.

When the check comes, she grabs it before he can. “Nope.” She elongates the word, lips popping on the p. “My interview, my expense report.”

He can’t convince her to get back on his motorcycle, so he makes her promise to let him know she’s gotten home safe. He swipes her phone, inputs his number, and closes the uber door behind her before she has a chance to protest.

 

He’s already home, laying on top of his bed with his clothes still on, when she texts: “home and locked in where the bad guys can’t get me.”

He shoots back: “don’t forget to check under the bed. sleep tight, betts.”

He grins at the darkened ceiling like an idiot and waits a long time for sleep to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just reiterating from Second City that the absolutely highest Jug’s BAC could get here is .046, so he’s fine to drive/ride. Also it doesn’t even get that high cause they eat. But, like, don’t drink and drive. Obviously.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jughead stops paying attention to Archie’s words as soon as Betty sits down next to him. He’s too busy measuring the space between their bodies in increasingly implausible distances, in handbreadths, in millimeters, in eyelashes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers from _The Third Man_. But not really. Cause it came out in 1949. If you haven’t seen it, Jughead the Cinephile is disappointed in you.

Jughead stops paying attention to Archie’s words as soon as Betty sits down next to him. He’s too busy measuring the space between their bodies in increasingly implausible distances, in handbreadths, in millimeters, in eyelashes. How deep a breath would he have to take to bring their shoulders together? How long does a person usually sit still before readjusting?

As his hands are otherwise occupied—holding an iPad and digging into the couch cushion behind Betty’s shoulder, respectively—he tenses his legs instead.

He has the absurd urge to try the sneeze and grab, just to close that small but insurmountable distance between his hand and her shoulder. But he knows better. He knows she would startle like a deer from a hiker.

All in all, it’s a a relief when Veronica kicks him out and he can join Mike on the front porch, can focus on the feel of the beads of condensation trapped between his hand and the beer bottle Mike gives to him.

 

After dinner, they’re banished to the back porch, a nice change of scenery, while Mike and Mary clean up. He tries not to read anything into it. Normally it’s his job to load the dishwasher, to eat whatever bits of food remain on plates before he does so. Yes, he is aware that this is normally the role of the family dog. But Betty doesn’t know their rituals, and he doesn’t want to leave her alone, or make her uncomfortable by presuming an intimacy with Mike and Mary which she may not share.

So, she leans her elbows on the railing and he tucks his hip into the place where it meets a column. She’s drawing out the end of her glass of wine from dinner. He tries not to stare at the delicate bones of her hand when she grips the stem and swirls the bowl of the glass, or at the long line of her throat when she has to tip her head back to swallow the dregs.

They’re quiet. It’s almost peaceful, the way the beams of light cut across the rooftops as the sun slinks away. With each breath, he relishes the hit of nicotine from the cigarette between his lips. He had contemplated quitting. He’s trying to remember why when her voice cuts across his thoughts.

“How’d you get out, Jug?”

“What?”

“The Serpents. You were in a gang. Teenage gang members don’t usually wind up with full rides to tier one colleges.”

Oh.

Fuck.

“You’ve been talking to Mary.” This was probably inevitable. He shoves his beanie in his back pocket so he can ruffle the top of his hair. “FP found out after a while and lost his shit. He managed to get a hold of my foster parents from prison and all of a sudden, junior year, I was being escorted to and from school. It let up after his trial, but he also reamed out the Serpents. So that was sort of it for my career as a gang banger.” Please  _please_  God let her be satisfied, let her leave it at that.

“Oh, that’s why you disappeared for a while.”

“Disappeared?”

“I mean I stopped seeing you around town. And then when I did again…”

“You were with Archie.” It’s been so many years and, still, the image that materializes is a punch in the gut.

“Yeah, and you were with that other blonde girl.”

“Sabrina.”

“Yeah. I would get this quick little pang when I would see you around town, at Pop’s or with Sabrina, I always thought it was regret that I’d let our friendship die along with our relationship.” Pang is a mild word for what Jughead feels, both then and now. “I mean, we drifted apart and eventually we both moved on. We should have been able to still be friends.”

“It wasn’t like that with Sabrina, you know. She had a boyfriend. Harley? Harvey? I don’t know. Last I heard they’d just gotten back together.” It seems stupidly important that he correct her on this point.

“No I didn’t know.”

They stand in silence for a while while he builds up the courage to give her words back to her.

“I regretted it too. That we lost our friendship as well. That I lost both of your friendships.”

“Yeah well, you’re the one who walked away.”

“What? Betty, I didn’t” He forces himself to take a deep breath through his nostrils and the sound is harsh.  “Okay. Yeah. I did.”

“And you didn’t come back.”

“There was still shit going on, Betts. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

“Why not? If not the Serpents, what else?”

“Even if I wasn’t a member anymore the Serpents were still a factor. They were still my friends. My dad was still in jail. We were still in the middle of a fucking civil war. We’d already been threatened, and not just with the pig’s blood.”

“Please. No one threatened me beyond Chuck and his usual douchebaggery.”

“Not true.”

“Oh yeah, who was the big threat? And why don’t I know about it?”

Every muscle in his body locks into place. He flicks away his half-finished cigarette in frustration. At her. At this. At himself. “Ah—no. You’re right, you weren’t. I’m misremembering. I must have just been thinking about something else Chuck did.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.” It’s not a lie. But it’s not the truth either.

“Fine, whatever. Don’t tell me. I suppose I’ve gone this long not knowing.”

“Betty.” He doesn’t know what he’s trying to say. The two syllables of her name have always sounded like a prayer, now they sound like penance. When he suggested to Mary that she invite Betty to their dinner, he’d tried to make it sound like a whim. A natural extension of his and Betty’s recent proximity, of Mary’s kindness, of all of their history. But it wasn’t a whim.

He says her name and realizes he’s going to have to tell her. If he has any hope of this continuing, of maintaining her sudden reappearance in his life. Until this moment, he wouldn’t have admitted that’s a thing he wanted, even to himself.

But if he wants it, he’s going to have to break her heart, and his own, again. And he doesn’t know if he’ll be strong enough to do it a second time.

“I’m going to go help with dessert.”

He follows her in a few minutes later, resumes his seat across from her. The millimeters now feel like miles.

Jughead jumps at Mike’s offer to work on the desk, desperate for an activity that will shut off his brain for a while. He cannot bear to be so near her.

 

 

The system moves slowly, like maple syrup in winter.

FP couldn’t make bail, so they transferred him to the county correctional facility in Greendale to await trial. It took more than a year.

Jughead visited when he could. At first, Betty drove him when she could manage to get one of her parent’s cars. Then, once he had a bike, she still insisted on coming with, even though he tried to stop her from coming inside.

After, he went alone, or with Penny Peabody, the lawyer he neither liked nor trusted, or with Viper, who became the Serpents’ acting leader in the wake of FP’s arrest, Mustang’s death, and Joaquin’s continued absence.

When winter, and FP’s trial date, approached, when FP had stopped asking him about Betty, he showed up, for the first time, in his Serpents jacket.

FP screamed and Jughead swears, to this day, he had never heard him so animated, so adamant in his entire life. “That is not what I meant, Viper and you know it. God damnit!” The last, punctuated by a foot to the rickety metal table at which they sat, brought the guards running. “I said  _protect him_  not  _initiate him_.”

In retrospect, he understands why FP was so upset. He understands that gangs are serious business. That they’re no place for sixteen year olds. That FP wouldn’t have been embroiled in the whole Jason Blossom mess without the Serpents.

But at the time it felt like just another family his father’s decisions took away from him.

 

FP intervened before he could get the tattoo. Which he supposes he’s grateful for. He didn’t really fancy the idea of his own personal Dark Mark. But he also didn’t appreciate the face FP made when he saw the tattoo Jughead did get a few years later of his own free will.

 

 

He didn’t see her much afterward. And when he did, it wasn’t for lack of trying. He avoided Pop’s, SoDale, Pickens’ Park, any of the places they once frequented together. But one morning in September, when FP was seven months into his sentence, he was waiting in the cab of Viper’s truck to be dropped off at his new job at the depressingly indoor, depressingly suburban Cineplex, when it happened.

He saw Archie and Betty. Her hair was down and wavy. Her eyes looked dark, shadowed, from far away. He imagined it was because she had little smudges of makeup beneath her eyes.

Once, they’d fallen asleep in his bed at his foster parents’ house while waiting for dinner to be ready, worn out from a long week of not seeing each other and late night phone calls. When they’d woken to his foster father’s embarrassed knock on the door, Betty’s mascara had left a pattern of dark snowflakes across the translucent skin below her eyes.

He brushed them away with the pads of his thumbs. She grabbed his hand and made a wish before blowing away the eyelash that had traveled with the worn off makeup.

Archie held the bakery door open for her and she blushed, shrugging one of his sweatshirts higher up on her shoulders. Jughead crushed his empty coffee cup and spilled the few remaining drops on his jeans.

It wasn’t surprising, really, that they’d find their way to each other eventually. He’d been waiting for it to happen since they were all six years old, since he realized Betty and Archie and their families existed in a different world than his own. But it still hurt. It was still the moment Jughead realized he’d never get her back. That his actions had broken them, that he couldn’t put them back together.

 

 

As he toils away in the basement, Jughead ruminates on a line from his favorite film noir. He ruminates on the increasingly demoralized Rollo Martins, climbing the stairs to Anna’s room, hoping the truth about Harry Lime would somehow “pay the mortmain that memory levies on human beings.” It’s a line that’s stuck with him. Because it doesn’t work. Anna still loves, will always love, Harry, even though he’s a criminal and murderer.

That moment, on a cold September morning outside a bakery, when he sees Archie and Betty together for the first time. And that other moment, years later, when Archie tells him Betty’s engaged. Those moments shine the light on a truth he’s otherwise been sometimessuccessful at shadowing. You cannot pay a mortmain. You own your memories in perpetuity. They cannot be escaped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jughead and Betty need Pensieves. These memories are rough, y’all. 
> 
> Also, the quote isn’t actually in the film (I don’t remember it off the top of my head, at least), but is from the novella that serves as its libretto. Though Jug’s interpretation is off. He’s remembering the film’s ending rather than the novella’s.
> 
> Anyway, once again, it’s from The Third Man, film by Carol Reed (with Orson Welles as Harry Lime) and novella/script by Graham Greene. Both are (well, well) worth a watch/read.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The scent of her lotion hits him with a wave of memory so strong, for a moment he can taste one of Pop’s cheeseburgers. He can taste the menthol in the lip gloss she used to wear. He can taste…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys I wrote four chapters this weekend. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I hope it stays there.

“Any idea why Mary left this on the sink in the bathroom?” He hands Betty a cellophane-wrapped gift basket and an envelope, her name in Mary’s handwriting across the front.

She takes the card out and her face slips into a gentle smile. “A thank you gift for looking after the house.”

The basket is filled with little toiletries, the kind you’d find in a fancy hotel. Betty opens a plastic bottle and squeezes out some lotion. “It smells like a person I used to be.”

He shuffles closer to her so he can smell her hands over the lingering aromas of garlic, tomato sauce, melted cheese. “It smells like Friday nights in the cab of FP’s truck, driving you home.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” Then, the scent of the lotion hits him with a wave of memory so strong, for a moment he can taste one of Pop’s cheeseburgers. He can taste the menthol in the lip gloss she used to wear. He can taste—

“Maybe you could stay for a while. We could…watch a movie.”

He doesn’t realize he’s leaning toward her until she speaks and his head jerks back in surprise. “I’d like that.”

 

She gets so excited when she sees _Before Sunrise_ is on TV that she immediately launches into a _viva_ on why it’s amazing and why he needs to see it and why Julie Delpy is her forever girl crush. And so, he capitulates. He gives up on his campaign for _Django Unchained_ , a modern classic that, unbelievably, Betty has never seen.

He _has_ seen _Before Sunrise_. Has seen the whole trilogy, actually. He went through a Richard Linklater phase a few years ago, after he discovered _Boyhood_. But he also saw them in college. A girl he hooked up with had made him watch them, saying they were so romantic. His lack of reaction exasperated her. Now, he wants to give Betty exactly the reaction she is looking for. She assumes he hasn’t seen _Before Sunrise_ , and so he doesn’t have the heart to disappoint her.

Nothing about this day has gone how Jughead expected. He’s normally a creature of routine. He likes the regular pattern of his days, the small undulations of activity. Now, as he sits on the opposite end of the couch from Betty Cooper, and as her bare feet sometimes brush his thigh, he’s thankful for unmet expectations. It’s the cherry on top of what has turned into a surprisingly happy day. He scoots down so he can rest his head against the back of the couch and stretches his legs so one is braced on the coffee table in front of them and the other is extended out toward Betty. If that brings her feet closer to his leg, so be it. It’s a comfortable position, damnit.

 

His familiarity with Linklater’s canon means his mind wanders in and out over the course of the movie.

When Jesse tells Celine, "You know what's the worst thing about somebody breaking up with you? It's when you remember how little you thought about the people you broke up with and you realize that is how little they're thinking of you,” he remembers Betty, so nervous and so brave, interrupting him in the basement this afternoon. He’d chosen Leonard Cohen to accompany his work, the low tones just enough to cover the sound of her feet pattering overhead. It did such a good job that he hadn’t noticed her until she was close enough to pitch his heart into a staccato rhythm that momentarily alarmed him.

“Hi, um, are you busy? I wanted to talk to you.” He didn’t think she noticed, but her hands fluttered in perpetual motion—around each other, against the thighs of her jeans, into the hem of her shirt.

“No, not really. What’s up?” He removed his safety glasses and tossed them behind him, leaning against the table and running a hand through his hair.

“I just wanted to apologize to you. About before. You don’t owe me an explanation. You had every right to break up with me. We were in high school. That’s what people in high school do.” Her apology startled him into speechlessness, a rare occurrence in his life. But he knew she was expecting him to respond.

“Thanks, I guess, though you don’t have to apologize. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. I may have had a right to, but I definitely didn’t go about it in a very good way.” It’s not at all what he meant to say. But somehow, it’s what came out.

“Friends, then? I’d really like us to be friends.” Betty extended her hand. This time, he managed to shake it like a sane person.

“Friends. Definitely friends.”

“So…what are you doing?” Mercifully, she landed on a topic he could go on about for days. He showed her his progress and glowed like a lightning bug at her praise and her desire to help. Betty and power tools was not a combination his imagination needed. It was up there with Betty and mechanic tools, a fantasy he only let himself revisit at the lowest of times.

Now, the glory of the moment has passed and all he can do is berate himself for being a yellow-bellied coward. Some people may break up because ‘that’s what people in high school do,’ but they weren’t some people. And Betty knows it as well as he does. But the currency of any relationship is secrets, closely guarded, bartered, traded away.

 

Later, when Celine says, “If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt,” he remembers Betty calling him out for playing with his hair and asking about the whereabouts of his old beanie. He hadn’t been able to help himself from spilling his guts then.

“It’s at home. I don’t wear it most of the time anymore. It’s basically my security blanket. For when I’m feeling off-kilter. I actually didn’t even have it in Chicago with me until recently. I saw it in my room in Riverdale and grabbed it more out of nostalgia than anything.” That wasn’t a thing he needed her to know. Oh well.

Sometimes, being around her is like peering through the looking-glass. She’s simultaneously a sixteen year old girl and the grown-up woman before him. It trips his tongue up. He knows her and he doesn’t. Once, he knew every freckle on her skin, every turn of expression. Every shade in her eyes. When she looks at him, he doesn’t know if he’s falling or floating. But he never wants to stop.

He knew he needed a reality check, so he said, “Can I ask about Hunter?”

“Oh, sure. There’s no big story. It just…wasn’t meant to be.”

His mouth was full of lasagna so he tried to gesture at her so she’d keep talking.

Betty leaned back in her chair and wrinkled her nose, drawing up one side of her upper lip.. “We met in college. For some reason, the editor of the paper wanted me to try my hand at the sports section. So I covered a lacrosse game where he got hit in the face.”

He’d known she was engaged, but had managed to avoid any information about the man in question. He sounded like Archie but with a trust fund. Jughead attempted to cover his reaction with humor.

“Stop it.  Honestly, when I look back on it now — he definitely seems more like the kind of guy Veronica would go for, not me. Or Kevin. Kevin definitely had a crush on him for a while when we first started dating. But yeah. I loved him, I think. I just realized I didn’t love him enough to marry him.” It was a story he could have written for himself. No one was enough to fill the Betty-shaped hole in his amygdala.

“Any girls in your life?”

“No one worth mentioning. Not now, anyway.”

 

He glances over at Betty on the couch beside him. Her legs are curled up like a doodle bug’s. She’s somehow managed to wrap herself up in the throw blanket like a burrito and her head rests on her clasped hands, the pillow discarded near her waist. He remembers the words he'd used to describe her _._ She is the lamp in Hero’s tower, the scissors in Delilah’s hand, the blood in Guinevere’s bed. She is a million and one metaphors and all of them are his undoing.

Once, she was the cushion that let him be the most broken of his selves.

At some point in the past decade or so of his life, between JB moving home and starting high school, between finishing college and publishing his book, between losing Betty and regaining Archie, he made the decision to just take what he’d been given. Jughead had given up being a misanthrope for Betty Cooper once, he tells himself he isn’t willing to risk giving in to hope again.

 

When the movie ends, he turns off the TV. Betty rolls herself up to a sitting position, her hair disheveled and her eyes lidded.

“So what did you think? Did you like it? Do you think they come back in six months?” The wine has made her sleepy. Her lips slide off one another and Jughead can’t help himself from wondering, again, what they’d taste like – the oak of the wine or the tang he remembers as Betty. A tang he is no longer sure he hasn’t just made up. He shakes himself out of those thoughts.

“It was cute. My vote is he does, she doesn’t.”

“Interesting. Even though Celine is the more romantic of the two?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, I guess you’ll just have to watch the sequel to find out.”

“Guess so. I like that it ends on the ambiguity, that the audience gets to decide. They simultaneously do and don’t. Like Schrödinger’s date.” He pauses and turns to face her, pulling one leg up onto the couch. “But also, doesn’t the fact that there is a sequel indicate that they do come back?”

“No spoilers.”

“Have it your way.” He reaches forward and swipes his phone off the coffee table. “I’ll just look it up on IMDB.”

“Forsythe Jones!”

“Elizabeth Cooper!” Betty leans toward him, so he lifts the phone above her head. It’s childish, but she’s close enough that he can again smell the lotion. Then she gets him right in the ribs, right in the spot he’s most ticklish. He’s surprised for a moment when she plays dirty, but he shouldn’t be.

He repeats himself, “Have it your way then, spoilsport.”

“I am not the one being a spoilsport here. You were _literally_ going to look up spoilers.” She’s so emphatic he can almost hear the italics, so he just laughs in response.

 

He’ll take what he’s been given. Today, he’s been given friendship. So he makes some noises about having to get home because it’s late. He gathers up his helmet and other accoutrements. Betty follows him to the back door, still wrapped in the throw blanket from the couch. Just before he slips out the door, he pulls her into a hug, cupping the back of her head and pressing his face into her hair.

Scratch that, _this_ is the cherry on top of this weird but wonderful day.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But now, with the memory of her hand on his arm, it’s as if he’s been given permission. The web of gossamer separating them has fallen away. He can’t stop touching her. Just gentle brushes against her lower back, hopefully gentle enough that she’ll think they’re an accident.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to remind you all how much I love and appreciate you and this wonderful community we’re cultivating <3

When Jellybean yells at him and hangs up their call, he dials his father instead. He expects some sympathy. FP has basically been okay with Jughead co-parenting Jellybean, at least to the extent she’d let him. His dad is a very hands-off kind of authority figure, which is probably for the best. But here, though—Jughead thought his insistence his kids amount to something more than he did would extend to JB going to college.

Instead, he gets an earful about elitism and the shrinking middle class and the earning potential of a technical education. Not that FP uses so many words, but Jughead knows the point he’s trying to make.

He finds out FP has been taking some classes at the same community college JB plans to attend. He wouldn’t admit it, but he’s a little bit proud of them both.

He’s holding his head in one hand, properly chastised, when someone knocks and opens the door.

Betty. He feels the frown melt off his face as he waves her inside. She comes in and leans against the door to push it closed.

“I know, Dad. I know. No, she’s just—”

“She’s eighteen now, Jug. You gotta let her make her own mistakes.” FP’s voice is gruff is in ear.

“Look, can you just talk to her? Maybe she’ll listen to you.”

“We have talked about it.I don’t have any reason not to agree with her logic.”

“I know that, but you can at least explain _my_ reasons.”

“If you want me to parrot everything I just heard you shout at her from the other room, I’m not getting involved. I might be willing to mention that you have a few points worth considering. Considering, mind you.”

“Fine. Can we come back to this conversation later?”

“If you want. Maybe give your sister a day or two to let off some steam. You do it too. I’m too old to referee your arguments.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Hey—I love you, son.”

“Love you too.” He ends the call and holds his phone in his lap.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” There’s a little red bubble above the messages app. He taps it with his thumb. “Oh, you texted.”

“Yeah, nothing important. How’s FP?”

“Fine.”

Betty makes her “I know you’re sidestepping” face at him. “He is. JB on the other hand…” He lets the sentence trail off. He doesn’t want to involve her in his family drama.

“Wanna talk about it?” But then she comes to sit next to him on the bed, and, suddenly, he does want to talk about it.

“She got into Syracuse but she’s insisting she’s going to stay home and go to community college. Wants to study sound engineering or something.”

“I mean if that’s what she wants to do. You don’t want her spending four years unhappy and coming out of it in debt.”

Jughead barely holds in his scoff. With their father’s income and their background, there’s no way JB would have to pay full-price, and he was fully prepared to make up the difference. He is a pro at navigating the US Department of Education’s financial aid racket.

“But that’s not it. She thinks we don’t know it’s cause she doesn’t want to leave FP. And _she’s_ the one who always insists he’s okay. Tells me _I_ worry too much.”

“How does FP feel about it?”

“He says she’s an adult and can make her own decisions. She’s sure as hell not an adult if she’s gonna screw all her decisions up.” He clenches a fist in the bedspread to his right.

“But you know you can’t decide for her.” Then Betty places a hand on the arm that’s still tensed and for a split second Jughead’s mind goes blank. He tries to remember if this is the first time she’s willingly touched him this decade, beyond a couple of obligatory handshakes and the vice grip she latched onto his abdomen when he drove her home the first night.

“So why the blow up now? Didn’t she have to decide on a school a few months ago?”

“Well, yeah. But I may have thought she was gonna come to her senses and sent in a deposit for her.”

“Oh, Jug.” The look Betty gives him makes him squirm a little. Internally. Hopefully internally. Look. He’s not _proud_ of what he did. But he still thinks it was the right choice. And he wants JB to have options. He can eat a few hundred dollars if he needs to. He’s just still hoping it won’t come to that.

They talk for a few more minutes, Betty’s presence beside him banishing the shadows without his even thinking about it. Then he smiles at her and says, “Hey, let’s go rejoin the party. They’re probably wondering where you are.”

“Yeah, okay.” When they stand to leave, his hand drifts to the space between her shoulder blades as of its own accord. As if it belonged there.

 

In his inner monologue, he’s been berating himself for hugging her that night. He’d grown used to the constant undercurrent of pathetic longing that accompanied his every day life. He’s been through the five stages of grief, and still this is what he is left with. So he carries it with him. But Betty’s sudden reappearances in his life, and the increasing frequency of those appearances, is making it harder and harder to maintain his equilibrium. He can live with longing. He can live with regret. It is much, much harder to live with want. A want that grumbles in his stomach and shoots through his fingertips every time she gets near him.

He feels even more pathetic for wanting someone who has so clearly moved on.

When they head downstairs, he piles an outrageous amount of food onto a paper plate too flimsy to hold it all up—better grab a second one to reinforce it—and he tries to distract himself. But now, with the memory of her hand on his arm, it’s as if he’s been given permission. The web of gossamer separating them has fallen away. He can’t stop touching her. Just gentle brushes against her lower back, hopefully gentle enough that she’ll think they’re an accident.

And he can’t stop himself from following her when she heads inside to help Mary with yet another in an endless array of party tasks. Never mind she’s not the host. Betty, every iteration of her from four years old on up, loves to help. He used to wonder if it was a conscious thing, an attempt to live up to her parents’ expectations, to compensate for never quite succeeding. But it’s not. It’s just her.

So he walks up behind her where she’s humming and slicing watermelon in the kitchen. But apparently he’s become much stealthier than he used to be, because he scares her and she jolts and slashes her thumb with a fucking huge knife. Crisis mode kicks on and he drags her to the sink and sticks her hand under the faucet.

“Jesus, Betty, I’m sorry. I just wanted to check on you —”

“It’s okay Jug, it’s just a cut. It’ll be fine.”

As if it weren’t already apparent, he still has a thing for her hands, how they hold all the disparate pieces of her. As he suds up his own and begins to wash her cut as softly as he can, his mind records the details. Her wrist, so small in his grip. Tapered fingers and trim nails in contrast his own brown, square digits. Her tiny bird bones where they quiver beneath her skin. The rough little ridges in the heart of her palm. He uses one of his hands to hold hers in place, his thumb hooking over the narrow forearm bone. His other cups her fingers, curling them in his palm, and he passes his own thumb over hers. Just before he finishes, he slips his fingers between hers, entwining them as he rubs their hands together and washes them clean, together, for good measure.

He waits until all the soap suds have disappeared, then says, “Here, come on. I’ll wrap it up.”

Back in the bathroom where he discovered the gift basket, and the lotion, that had tumbled his thoughts into their current mess, he strives to impose order through activity. He sets out: Gauze pad. Medical tape. Neosporin. Hand.

Hand which is still a little wet. He glances around and his eyes land on the hand towel next to the sink. Not a good choice. As much as Mary’s house always looks like something out of a magazine—to the point that he’s sometimes afraid his gawky limbs are going to break something—he does not know how many other people have used this bathroom today, and he does not trust their germs on Betty’s skin.

So he bends his head down and blows on her cut. The sound she makes freezes every atom in his body and sends his blood pressure rocketing skyward.

Order. Discipline. Medical care. He gets through applying the bandage with some form of competency.

She seems to be breathing a little erratically. Maybe she was lying about it being okay.

Then, he notices, he’s moved into the moon of her thighs. He’s still holding her hand, the skin of her wrist velvet-soft beneath his fingers. He never makes a conscious decision to kiss her. But her gaze slides between his eyes and his lips and he’s a goner.

When she kisses him back, he nearly has a myocardial infarction right there on the bathroom floor. When she sweeps her tongue into his mouth, he realizes he did and now he’s dead and this is heaven.

But if it’s heaven, he will not be rushed. He has eternity to relearn the contours of Betty’s mouth, the taste of her skin.

When he moves to her neck, she lets out a small noise that acts as an AED on his nervous system. He’s not dead. He can’t be doing this. It’s wrong. And he tries to tell her so.

“We’re not doing anything. We’re making out in a bathroom.”

Jughead laughs before he can stop himself. It’s funny for a lot of reasons he doesn’t have the blood flow to pinpoint right now, but Betty’s absurd clinging to the barebones facts of the situation only just barely makes the list.

Then Betty wraps her arm around his neck and commandeers his mouth, and he’s in no position to put up further protest for a while. The words escape him. She escapes him. Her details overwhelm him and he lets them drag him under.

Eventually, his frontolimbic network convinces him to try again.

“Betty, stop. There are things I need to—”

“Later.”

He makes a concerted effort to stop her. To tell her. He does. But, really, nothing he has to say about himself is worse than anything she already knows. If she wants to do this, even with everything between them, maybe he can be a little bit selfish.

With that unsatisfying thought, his brain goes offline. She’s worn him down with her noises and her tongue and the feel of her finally, finally, beneath his hands.

By the time she threatens to bite him, he’s about ready to crawl out of his skin and into hers. He tilts her head back and sucks his way down her neck. He times it so he circles his hips against her as he nibbles on her collarbones.

Then a knock sounds on the bathroom door. Fuck his life.

 

When they make it back to the party, they don’t talk about what just happened. But the evening passes pleasantly, peacefully enough. He still touches her and she doesn’t startle. But he doesn’t want to make any assumptions, doesn’t want to scare her away. So, like they said. Friends. It’s more than he ever hoped for. It isn’t enough.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is powerless in many things, but he’s determined that right now, at least, she’s his to make fall apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y’all, I really didn’t intend to write the smut from both perspectives. But then somehow I did.

Jughead is in the middle of swearing profusely and digging a towel out of his dryer when he hears a knock on the front door. It’s odd. People don’t normally knock on his front door—everyone he knows texts first—and they definitely don’t knock on a Sunday morning before breakfast.

“Betty?” Of course. Who else would be up and about so early after not getting home til close to 2 am? Her eyebrows are drawn together and she’s chewing on her bottom lip, a tote bag hanging from one hand and the sun glinting off her hair. Surprise quickly gives way to a warmth deep inside him that banishes the rest of the sleep from his mind.

“I just—sorry—I just wanted to check out the farmer’s market here and I texted Mary for your address on a whim. It was stupid. I’ll let you get back to your Sunday morning.”

“No—no, come in.” He takes her hand and pulls her into the house.

In his kitchen, they survey the debris from his attempt at making himself a nice Sunday brunch. She places an overturned bottle of maple syrup back on its base, before licking a stray drop off the tip of her index finger.

“Ah, yeah. I had a bit of an accident right before you came. I was actually about to hop in the shower.” He tosses the towel he’d rescued onto a chair. “I was trying to make pancakes.”

“You know, most people usually put the maple syrup on  _after_  they’ve cooked the pancakes.”

“Smart aleck. Jones family recipe says you put a little in the batter too. But my hand slipped and I sort of spilled it all over me.” He gestures down at his chest. Oh. Some lint had gotten caught in the sticky patch on his sternum. Awesome.

“You can go ahead and set your stuff on the chair. I’m just gonna go wipe this shit off and put a shirt on.”

Say what you want about the Blossoms, and he had  _plenty_  to say, they knew how to make some damn fine maple syrup. Every kid in Riverdale grew up on it. It was like crack, an addiction he continues to seek out over all over sucrose-based alternatives, though hopefully now through sources that don’t also traffic heroin.

 

He grabs a t shirt off the foot of his bed and heads back to the kitchen. He only looks at just what t shirt he’d grabbed when Betty stares at him as if he’s grown a second head. “Jelly got it for me for Christmas.” Don’t get him wrong, he does consider himself a feminist, proudly so, but he doesn’t usually go in for advertising his basic human decency via his wardrobe.

Betty snorts in a way that’s both adorable and that makes him wonder if she’s aspirated something when suddenly she’s in his arms and she’s kissing him.

Today, he doesn’t hesitate. His lifts his hands to her face and takes over the kiss, nipping at her lower lip so she’ll permit him entrance to her mouth.

She pulls him closer and he breaks away from her lips to pepper kisses all over her face. But then she uses her freedom to suck on the skin below his jaw and for a moment he feels as if the wind’s been knocked out of him.

Nope. The upper hand will be his today. So he threads his fingers through her hair and pulls her head back to expose her throat.“Did I tell you I like your hair like this?”

With the little range of movement he permits her, she shakes her head no.

“I do. I love your neck.” He kisses her again, still holding her head in place. Then he slides his other hand down her arm until he can link her fingers through his. He brings their joined hands up and kisses her bandaged thumb before sliding her arm over his shoulder.

He remembers telling her once that he could never tire of kissing her. That he could do it all day every day and never get bored. A besotted teenager’s hyperbole to the first girl, the only girl, to ever love him? Maybe. Still true, though.

He pushes off the stove and turns her, directing them back against a counter. When they reach it, he uses his new leverage to grip her ass and bring one of her legs around his waist. Betty grinds against him at the new sensation and he digs his fingers into her thigh in an attempt to control himself.

She starts pulling at the hem of his shirt and his stomach muscles contract when she scratches him.

“Off. Take it off.” He does, and when the shirt has cleared his eyes, he sees that she’s removed hers as well. He takes in the swell of her breasts, the patch of red that spreads over her chest. He’s still processing when she leans forward to press a kiss against his tattoo, against his heart.

All of his synapses are firing at once and he cannot take the extra stimulation of Betty’s mouth there. The thought that she’s kissing the little journal he added for her the day after he accepted his feelings weren’t going away and he couldn’t go after her and she wasn’t coming back. That is, until she did. That thought. He cannot handle that thought. He pushes her back.

“Let me.” But he’s too impatient to wait the extra three seconds it would take to unhook and discard her bra. Too impatient to be gentle. He yanks the cups down and gets his teeth around her nipple. The noise she makes goes straight to his dick. Like he needed to be any harder.

Then he feels her hand on the thin cotton of his pants and he nearly comes right then and there. Which would be more embarrassment than he could take. And he wore a crown-shaped beanie for every day of his adolescence. His embarrassment threshold is high. Through the roof, even. But coming in his pants the first time he gets to be with Betty Cooper, love of his life, in a dozen years? That would actually kill him. And with that thought comes a sudden self-consciousness, a sudden memory of who they are and who they were and how they got here.He groans into her hair and traps her hand with his.

“ _Fuck_. Stop, stop.” He tries to focus on the feeling of air moving in and out of his lungs. “Betty?

“Yeah?”

“Do you want this?”

“Mmph,” she whimpers, her lips again attached to his tattoo.

He leans back.“No. You have to tell me you want this.”

“Yes, Jug, yes. Please.” Up until this moment, he didn’t really believe it would get to this point. He has been so afraid to imagine anything when it came to Betty Cooper, anything beyond the tangental pieces that he cannot keep from making their way into his writing. But now, here she is, telling him in explicit, verbal terms that she wants him and it is not like any of the times he didn’t let himself imagine. It is not the climax or the happily ever after of their story. In fact, probably, it’s a blip on the radar. Probably, it’s going to bite him in the ass. But in this moment, with Betty’s bra around her waist and her chest flushed from his lips, and her hand under his, still trying to pump his cock, he cannot bring himself to care.

“Okay. Get up on the counter.”

She does. Meanwhile, he focuses on getting her naked as fast as possible.

When she is, he takes her mouth again before dropping to his knees and pressing a line of kisses along her inner thigh.

He has fantasies of keeping her here with him all day, teasing her until she falls apart again and again beneath his hands. But Betty has other plans.

“Later. Inside me, now.” The look she gives him is pure, unadulterated want and suddenly he can’t wait either.

She laughs at him when, in his haste, he rips the condom packet open with his teeth. But when he slips inside her and her eyes roll back and her head tilts up and he once again latches onto her neck, he figures they’re even.

Everything inside him drives at him to go faster and harder, to feel as much as he can all at once. But he holds back, studies Betty’s reactions, watches her face as he rubs his thumb against the space between her collarbones. When he feels her heels pressing into his back, he has a moment of being forced back into his sixteen year old body as he remembers this is one of Betty’s tells. She’s close.

“No, not yet.” He pushes her hips back so she can’t rub her clit against him. He is powerless in many things, but he’s determined that right now, at least, she’s his to make fall apart.

When some of the glazed look has left her eyes, he wraps an arm around her lower back and pulls her flush against him.

He kisses her, sucking her lower lip between his own, and then with their mouths still touching, asks, “Do you want to come?”

She makes a delicious sound he wants to swallow and hold inside his stomach forever.

“Then I’ll make you come, but it’s not nice to leave me behind.” Then he slips a hand between them and when she comes, she takes him with her.

 

When his vision and his breathing return to normal—not his heart rate, that’s still erratic—he says, “That wasn’t exactly how I planned on spending my Sunday morning.” He means it as a joke, but the look she gives him speaks of fear and worry and guilt and all of a sudden he’s slammed with the question behind it.

“No, Betts. I definitely wanted to.” The thought that that could  _ever_  be what he meant. That there could ever be a moment he wouldn’t want her is more tender and more vulnerable than he has the brain space to analyze right now. But he loves her for worrying about it. “That was so freaking hot. I just—look. I want to talk to you. Will you stay while I shower? I’ll make you breakfast. There’s even a little maple syrup left.”

 

If it wasn’t time before, now it’s definitely time to tell her. And he just about feels ready. As ready as he did the night he did try to come after her.

His last thought as he turns the shower off is that maybe, if she’s willing to forgive him for leaving her—at least enough to talk to him and to be with him this morning—maybe she’ll be willing to forgive him for this too. Maybe it will be okay.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> https://cooperjones2020.tumblr.com/


End file.
